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Courtesy of Samantha Gardner

Portola High Dance 3, 4 and Company attend an annual dance workshop at Disneyland. “For Disney, it's a very big character performance, which is a little bit different than what [dancers] are used to here,” Portola High dance director Samantha Gardner said. “They have to create that Disney magic for the people in the park and the teachers are great at pushing them to achieve that.”

Each year, several Portola High classes take their lessons beyond the classroom and into the magic of Disneyland, where they experience lessons first-hand and spend a memorable day with their classmates.

Portola High Dance 3, 4 and Company attend a workshop annually at Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure where dancers learn and adjust choreography from Disney professionals, according to Portola High dance director Samantha Gardner. The workshop steers away from solely focusing on technique, as it emphasizes performance — targeting ways that dancers can bring their energy and facial expressions to make dances more energetic and projected for the audience.

“I hope [dancers] take away confidence and a higher level of performance quality,” Gardner said. “Disney is so great at doing things big and over the top, and I’m always telling our dancers to put in more energy and make all of their movements bigger. They get pushed hard to do that at Disney.”

Disney through the Decades, a class that explores the cultural history of Disney and its impact on the United States holds an annual trip to Disneyland, where students experience their lessons firsthand. At the park, Disney Through the Decades teacher Heidi Martasian connects to lessons on the history of the Disney company by highlighting real-life examples, such as Disney legends’ names on Main Street windows, including Marc Davis, Harriet Burns, and Ron Dominguez.

As for rides, Martasian takes her class on the Jungle Cruise, a slow-moving boat ride through various rivers in a themed reconstruction of Asia, Africa and South America. 

“We watched a documentary at the beginning of the class [that] talked about problems with that ride,” Martasian said. “Initially, it dealt with a lot of audio animatronics and robotics equipment, and it wasn’t fully fleshed out in terms of the plant life and gardening when the park first opened in 1955.”

Portola High’s yearbook elective goes to Disneyland to attend a leadership presentation and celebrate the yearbook’s finalization. Yearbook student and junior Lochlann Hung says that the Disneyland trip helped the yearbook staff get closer to one another: an important aspect of working with a big team. For Hung, one of the biggest things he learned at the leadership presentation was how to prioritize his tasks. 

“One of Disney’s staff members made an analogy about juggling glass and rubber balls: some tasks were glass balls that you don’t get a second chance with, but some were rubber and you could just pick it up again,” Hung said.